Given a chance to be the Environmental minister of Delhi what proposal would you
put forward to the assembly to tackle the deteriorating (declining) air quality in the city
Answers
India takes steps to curb air pollutionArticle has an altmetric score of 62
India’s air pollution problem needs to be tackled systematically, taking an all-of-government approach, to reduce the huge burden of associated ill-health. Patralekha Chatterjee reports.
Nine-year-old Neil suffers from asthma. When he is sick – with wheezing, breathing problems or sleeplessness – he misses many of his favourite activities.
“He’d like to be out playing more, doing the things children love,” says his mother, lawyer Leena Menghaney, who also has asthma. “Some months he misses as much as seven or eight days of school.”
The Menghaney family lives in the middle-class neighbourhood of Indirapuram in Ghaziabad, a city of 2.3 million inhabitants that flanks the Indian capital of Delhi.
Air pollution is a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (umbrella term for several progressive lung diseases including emphysema) and lung cancer, and increases the risks for acute respiratory infections and exacerbates asthma.
With the economy booming in many of India’s cities since the turn of this century the number of road vehicles and dusty construction sites have multiplied, and outdoor air pollution has become a major health hazard and a major killer.
This adds to the already large burden of ill-health caused by household air pollution from the use of solid fuels for cooking in the world’s second most populous country of some 1.3 billion people.
In India, an estimated 1.5 million people died from the effects of air pollution in 2012, according to WHO data. Globally, air pollution – both indoor and outdoor – caused nearly 7 million deaths, or 11.6% of deaths in 2012, making it the world’s largest single environmental health risk, according to World health statistics 2016.
About 98% of cities in low- and middle-income countries with more than 100 000 inhabitants do not meet norms set out in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality guidelines, according to WHO’s global urban air quality database.
hope it helps you